23059622
submission
daria42 writes:
In a move which will escalate the debate over BitTorrent to the highest court in Australia, the country's High Court has agreed to hear the long-running case between one of the country's largest ISPs, iiNet, and a group of film and TV studios represented by a copyright organisation known as AFACT. The case has the potential to determine once and for all whether Australians who download content via BitTorrent can have their Internet connections disconnected upon the request of the studios. It's lawyers at ten paces!
22840822
submission
daria42 writes:
Is Apple trying to fire legal bullets in Australia but shooting blanks instead? Yes, according to Samsung, which was the target of an Apple lawsuit filed this week which saw the Korean electronics giant's Galaxy Tab 10.1 temporarily halted from sale in Australia. “Apple Inc. filed a complaint with the Federal Court of Australia involving a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 variant that Samsung Electronics had no plans of selling in Australia,” Samsung said this afternoon. And the real tablet is still to go on sale. Interesting — looks like Apple might not have won the victory everyone thought it did.
22724310
submission
daria42 writes:
The lawsuit filed by movie and TV studios against Australian Internet service provider iiNet appears to have taken a new twist, with the studios using early judgements in the case to attempt to push other ISPs towards what it has described as a "standardised automated processing system" for BitTorrent copyright infringement notices that would integrate with the ISPs' networks and automatically forward messages to customers when they were sent by the studios. Sound a bit Orwellian?
22663010
submission
daria42 writes:
Anyone who's watched British comedy 'Yes, Minister' will be familiar with the reams of briefing notes, memos and reports which government departments regularly furnish their ministers with, in dedicated ministerial bags or large boxes, often couriered late at night to their residence for reading. However, in at least one state government these physical bags are shortly to become a thing of the past, with the state of Queensland deciding instead to distribute all of the notes via iPad. The only question is, which is more attractive — playing Angry Birds, or reading Sir Humphrey Appleby's latest labyrinthine memorandum?
22557000
submission
daria42 writes:
After almost a decade of debate on the issue, video gamers in Australia are today rejoicing, with almost every state and territory nationally committing to introduce a R18+ video game classification. Some games such as Left 4 Dead 2 have previously had to be modified to remove blood to be sold in Australia, while others such as Mortal Kombat were banned outright. However, within a few months, the new classification will kick in, finally giving Australians unrestricted access to such 'adult' games, and bringing the country into line with the US, UK, Europe and other jurisdictions. The last holdout state, NSW, expects to reach a "reasonable compromise" on the issue soon.
22443272
submission
daria42 writes:
A bunch of researchers have been driving around Sydney, Australia, and scanning for unsecured Wi-Fi networks. You'd think that in this day and age, with all that we've learnt about security, that Wi-Fi security would be almost universal ... but the truth is that about 2.6 percent don't even have basic password protection. Extrapolating a little, that adds up to 10,000 unsecured Wi-Fi networks across Sydney alone. In addition, it's not clear how many of the remainder are using the now-insecure lesser-grade WEP encryption standard, which can be broken through. A hacker's paradise?
22189244
submission
daria42 writes:
As you might have heard, this month Australia gets a new Internet filter, using Interpol's blacklist of 'worst of the worst' child pornography sites. In general, it seems like most people don't object to the idea in principle, but concerns are being raised around the transparency of the scheme, which so far has no civilian oversight, unclear backing legislation and an appeals process which does not exactly inspire confidence. Why is it those who want to implement this kind of filtering never quite address these sort of concerns up-front?
22041128
submission
daria42 writes:
After four long years of debate about whether Australia will receive a mandatory Internet filter, finally some action has been taken. Yesterday the country's largest ISP, Telstra, started filtering all customers' connections for child pornography. The filter is DNS-based, meaning it's easy to circumvent, but you can't opt out of it — if you sign up to a plan with Telstra, your connection will be filtered for certain web addresses whether you like it or not. One giant step for censorship or only a positive move in the war against child pornography? Only time will tell.
21971996
submission
daria42 writes:
Microsoft looks like it's finally done quite a bit right with its hosted productivity suite Office 365 launched overnight. But spare a thought for international customers looking to deploy the software as a service. In Australia, for instance, Microsoft has set prices for Office 365 up to 76 percent higher than in the US. This is for exactly the same software, delivered from exactly the same datacentres. Enterprise customers will be particularly stung, while small business customers will pay close to 40% more. Ouch.
21860566
submission
daria42 writes:
Australia's controversial mandatory internet filtering scheme may be on the backburner for now, but that doesn't mean it's gone entirely. In the next month, the country's two largest ISPs, Telstra and Optus, will start voluntarily filtering users' connections for a list of URLs containing child pornography. The only thing is, the users themselves don't seem to have much choice in the matter — and as the Electronic Freedom Foundation points out — there are no avenues for appeal for those websites which may feel they've been unfairly blocked. Great.
21605282
submission
daria42 writes:
It’s taken several years, quite a lot of negotiation and the use of alternatives to get it through an uncertain period. But Australian open source conference linux.conf.au has finally permanently secure the rights to its own domain name. No more six month outages!
21577490
submission
daria42 writes:
Oops. Looks like some desk worker deep within the bowels of online video giant YouTube has accidentally hit the 'delete' key on the account of one of the Internet's highest-profile bloggers, Australia-based Darren Rowse, who operates the phenomally successful Problogger site. Anyone trying to view Rowse's videos — which have combined millions of views — are greeted today with a message informing them that his content had been removed as it violated YouTube's "spams and scams" policy. How long until someone in Google PR realises the error and gets this reversed?
21574430
submission
daria42 writes:
PayPal has long been one of the most-used payments option on the Internet; its history serving eBay's millions of users has now expanded into a wider remit across many e-commerce sites. But will the company ever become a valid option for point of sale payments at actual physical retail stores? Yes, according to PayPal's global president Scott Thompson — and PayPal's working on that right now, with one option based on mobile phones on the way and two others in development. It'll be interesting to see how far the company gets with its plans; personally I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be using such a system.
21512024
submission
daria42 writes:
For the past several years a number of IT managers and systems administrators have been agonising over whether to go with the standard, 'safe', Microsoft Exchange-based email option, or whether to switch their email into the 'cloud' and go with a provider like GMail. It's a tough choice, but one of Australia's largest airlines might have found a solution — deploy both: Outlook/Exchange in its corporate HQ and Gmail to support staff who don't need advanced features. The kicker is that incoming email is routed to the right platform depending on who it's addressed to, but it's all part oft he same domain. Interesting solution!
